


In Milford

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Canon Divergence, Episode: s07e15 En Ami, F/M, Fix-It, Healing, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-24 19:22:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20912807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: This time, she runs.





	In Milford

Dana Scully sleeps heavily and well, for the most part, despite the stress of her career and its frequent disruptions to her schedule. Because of the heft of her sleep, the strength of it, she is used to occasionally waking disoriented. In some cases, there are hospital beds involved, concerned Mulders hovering over her and touching her hair, or the skin on the back of her hand.

When it happens this time, though, the disorientation is complete, and the sense of dread that follows first shocks and then nearly immobilizes her. Strange bed, no Mulder. She’s wearing her own pajamas but is certain that she did not put them on herself. Someone has touched her. Someone has touched her without her knowledge and now she is in a strange bed.

Bursts of denial come first (maybe I just forgot, maybe it’s fine), but panic quickly follows, then nausea, and an urge to strip everything off and climb into a hot shower. She knows this is wrong. Instead, she removes her clothing carefully and sets it aside. _Preserve the evidence, Dana_. She examines her body: pink skin, the proper scars, no bruising except… one on her inner thigh, and her face falters. Was it there before? Was it left by Mulder’s fingers or the edge of some sharp counter or desk?

Was it new?

Scully breathes. In through the nose, out through the mouth. She removes her underwear and folds them neatly on top of her pajamas. She puts the whole pile into an evidence bag she carries for work. Slowly, she steps into new underwear, new pants, a bra and top. She finds her reflection in the mirror and notes her pillow-smudged makeup. She is the same, maybe. But also maybe not.

—

“How do you take your coffee?” He is smiling like nothing has happened, like an innocent old man.

She can’t look him in the eye. Her stomach squeezes. She says nothing, but walks to the phone that hangs on the wall beside the refrigerator. Her fingers tremble, but she dials without hesitation.

“Dana?” The old man asks, and she manages to shoot him a scathing look.

“Where are we?” She asks him. In her left ear, the line begins to ring.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just tell me where we are,” she says, her words like bricks of ice. He looks stricken and she wants to hurt him for feigning innocence, for feigning concern, like it is _she_ that has somehow wounded _him_.

“Milford, Pennsylvania,” he says.

As he speaks, the line picks up. “Mulder,” he says, and already, just at his name, she feels both stronger and more afraid.

“It’s me,” she says, raw.

“Scully? Goddamnit, Scully where are you?”

“Pennsylvania. I need you to—“ she swallows, “to meet me as soon as you can get here.”

The smoking man steps toward her, hands out, conciliatory. “I told you if you called him you’d get nothing. But let’s talk about this.”

“Who is that? Is that HIM?” Mulder’s voice is tight, strained. Scully backs up, closing off her body language from the older man. She is curled around the phone, nearly pressed to the wall.

“Uh,” she begins. “Yeah. I need, Mulder I need to get out of here. I don’t think I’m hurt, but I want to make sure. I’m going to go to the nearest hospital. I’ll need to find it, um.” She stops for a moment, breathing in.

“Scully.” She senses the panic in his voice and she hears him grabbing his keys already.

She stares at her feet and squeezes the thumb of the hand not holding the phone. “I’m okay. I think I’m okay.”

“Where in Pennsylvania?”

“Milford?”

“I’m on my way,” he says, and he hangs up, leaving her in the room with CGB Spender, who maintains a false, wounded look.

“What is this all about?” He asks.

“As if you don’t know.” She bends to pick up the bag she’d left at the doorway and moves toward the front door. “Where are the keys?” She keeps her eyes off him, heart pounding.

“Dana, please.”

She flinches at her first name, like he’s slapped her. “You drugged me! You changed my clothes without asking me.” She forces herself to breathe in and then out again. “What else did you do?”

The old man laughs as if this were incredulous and she wants to shoot him. She wants to punch him. She wants to dig her fingers into his neck until the last breath gurgles out of him. “You were exhausted. All I did was carry you to bed!”

“Keys,” she says, firm, and he tells her they’re in the ignition.

—

She drives three miles in the only direction she can: away. And then she pulls over onto dry gravel to collect herself. Her heart still pounds heavily and she bites her lips together, fighting back another wave of panic. Her phone is still tucked in the center console, a quarter charged. She could call the police if she needed to, call an ambulance. She’s still connected to the world. It takes her a full five minutes to find her location on the map, and she thinks, when she sees that they must have passed through Allentown, _how cruel_. She locates the nearest hospital and drives without thinking to a place where she will, once again, present herself as evidence.

—

There are a hundred and forty-seven ceiling tiles that she can see from where she lies prone on the hospital bed, some of them warped and browning. She has consented to this touching, but the room is cold and she wishes she were not alone. A camera clicks and she breathes. She counts again.

Five hours have stretched like an eternity between her first phone call to him this morning and the moment that Fox Mulder stomps in to find her sitting at the edge of the hospital bed. He radiates red rage. His energy is wild and uncontained. He shakes like he wants to either grab and hug her or start smashing every object in the room, but he does neither. Instead she watches him force himself still, force himself to find human words rather than animal rage.

“What happened?” He asks.

She licks her lips and tries to find her explanation. “He found me in Virginia and said there were answers in the chip, the one he used on the boy. He asked me to drive with him. He showed me a woman he said was a hundred and eighteen. He told me I wouldn’t allow myself to love you.” Her feet hover six inches over the floor, toes peeking from under a mauve, over-washed blanket. They told her not to put her clothes on just yet. They told her they’d bring her some pills: a strong antibiotic and two doses of levonorgestrel, just in case. The thought makes her want to scream until the world turns black. “And then I woke up in a strange bed and my clothes had been changed.”

The words come out flat, but their effect is immediate: a thick stillness, a silence. She thinks he has stopped breathing. When she finally looks at his face, it is awash with the same panic-_cum_-denial she’d felt that morning.

“He… he didn’t—“

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so. But I don’t know. He changed my clothes.”

“He touched you.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “Yeah.”

He nods, thinking, and she watches his panic-denial settle into a quiet anger. “I’ll murder him,” he says, matter of fact.

“Not if I do it first.”

Her words ease something between him: the reminder of her strength lessening some weight, and he steps forward, hesitant, hovering a few inches away. “Can I hug you, Scully?”

She looks up; the question surprises her. He’s never asked her anything like that before, and the deliberate consideration makes her lower lip tremble, makes her want to let loose some of this control. She nods, so he bends and captures her shoulders with his hands. He drops beside her on the bed and enfolds her like he’s trying to swallow her with his torso, trying to build her a suit of armor with his bones and flesh.

“I’m so sorry,” he says into her hair. HIs voice wobbles too. She allows herself to crack, just a little bit, shaking her head against his sweater and his safe, familiar scent: soap and spice that’s been peppered with the tang of anxious sweat.

“He might not have done anything. I might have overreacted.”

Mulder’s arms squeeze tighter. “No. You didn’t.”

He holds her that way until the nurse brings her clothes and her emergency contraception. As protocol. Just in case.

—

In the car Mulder explains how all of it, every move, was part of an elaborate setup, how her computer had been hacked, how Spender had posed as her, how some of the emails he’d sent with her name had been… personal. Graphic descriptions of herself sent to some scientist stranger. She’d been used the whole time, then.

Every part of her.

“I never trusted him.” She’s looking at her fingernails. “Even so… I never should have gone with him.”

The car is quiet for a long moment, marked only by the sound of tires on the highway. The sunset falls orange on newly planted fields as they pass, falls through her window and warms the bicep of her dark jacket.

“Why did you?” He asks finally. She’s been waiting for the question.

“Because—“ She begins, but stops the half-truth before it emerges. She wants to say it was the promise of the science, the drive toward some altruistic end-goal of reversing what these men had done to so many, or of healing the most vulnerable. But the truth is worse, more selfish. “It had never been me,” she says. “Before this I had never even been worthy of being used, or of being lured with the promise of truth. I’d only ever been hurt as your punishment, and I… I guess I wanted to know what it was like.”

“To be used?”

She frowns and almost doesn’t respond. “To be acknowledged,” she says after a moment. “As invested. As part of this search for answers.”

The farms grow fewer and the buildings taller as they approach Harrisburg. Her words, their revelation, hang between them. She thinks he must realize their truth: the men in this game, they’d only ever acknowledged her as an accessory, an inconvenient meddler at best, a weakness of Mulder’s they could poke at worst.

“Do you think I don’t acknowledge you?” His words are quiet, and not as defensive as she’d expected. Still, she wants this ride to be over. She wants out of this suit and into a bath, soft sheets, real food. She wants to be held and told that she’ll be okay, not to have a conversation about her agency, or lack thereof, in the grand narrative of some global conspiracy while driving down Interstate 81.

“Sometimes you do,” she says.

“But?”

“But sometimes you act like this quest is yours alone, like you own it or it owns you.” She sighs and brings her hands to her face, pressing fingers to her temples. “I have sunk my own costs too.”

“I know you have.”

“Even someone as evil as him, Mulder… I knew I couldn’t trust him. But I wanted to believe that even he saw me as more than a tool or pawn, that he sees me as more than my proximity to you.”

Mulder changes lanes, speeds past a line of trucks. “He appealed to your knowledge of medicine,” he says. “To your altruism, and your ability to save lives. Even if his end goal was still to take down some other player, at least it made you feel like you mattered.”

“Yeah,” she says, realizing the complexity of the old man’s motives. “It feels terrible.”

“I know it does.”

At that she smiles and turns to look at him. “I ran off and did something stupid, Mulder. And you bailed me out.”

“You bailed yourself out. And we’re nowhere near even.” He reaches his hand across the center console, and she takes it. He lifts it to his lips and kisses her knuckles. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Scully. Everything about this was a violation, and I’m so sorry.”

She nods, grateful to him for being here, for understanding. “Will you cover for me when I kill him?”

“You know I will.”

She smiles and squeezes his fingers, then lets her head fall back against the seat. It’s been a very long day. With their fingers clasped between them, she rests.

—

He feeds her dinner somewhere near Gettysburg where she takes the first dose of levonorgestrel and tries not to think about it: the horrible irony of it, the fact that she surely, can’t, doesn’t need it, but _just in case_. Mulder says nothing, but his eyes are hooded and sad.

He brings her home and finds her clean pajamas while she takes a bath. He puts on the good music for her (the Joni Mitchell, not the Bach) while she soaks, and he has made a place for himself on the couch when she emerges in clean cotton. He stands, pillow in hand, throw blanket spread across the cushions, looking nervous. “I thought maybe you’d want… Because of—“

“No,” she says. She’s suddenly afraid that he thinks her too fragile to touch. “No, can you—I mean, if it’s okay, I’d rather you sleep with me? Like usual?”

She’s glad for the relief on his face when he smiles. He brings the pillow with him, back to her bedroom where he is warm and takes up his usual three-quarters of the bed. His weight holds her, but does not hold her down. She presses her face into his chest, curls her palm over the skin of his hip. She tells him, “Thank you.”

He kisses her still-damp hair and tells her, “I love you.”

His words surprise her, for the second time that day, and she finds herself wanting to cry. Her nose stings, and she sniffs, nods. “Yeah,” she says. “I love you.” And then she sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> En Ami is really upsetting in a way that I was going to say few episodes were, and then I thought of how many times medical and sexual violation were made light of without addressing their effects (Red Museum, Excelsius Dei, Small Potatoes, Post Modern Prometheus, etc. etc.). Anyway, I hope I’ve handled it a little more sensitively than 1013/Fox. I know I needed this version of the story, so maybe others did too.


End file.
